Virtual seminar with Juliane Rohrwacher and Rubina on Insects and Arachnids in Art

This free virtual seminar will take place on Wednesday 5 March 2025, from 3–4:30 PM Irish Standard Time. This seminar is part of a series that runs in the academic year 2024-2025, organised by the Animal Studies Research Network UCD, as part of its Environmental Humanities strand.

Juliane Rohrwacher will join us to discuss Tomás Saraceno’s work and explore how post-anthropocentric art that is aware of the challenges in amplifying non-human voices, without falsifying them in the translation process, can improve non-human animal representation in the mainstream discourse, as well as enable non-human life to represent itself in the experimental space of immersive artscapes. Saraceno’s intention is for his audience to “become more sensitive to try to reinsert[oneself] into a world that we are not sensing” (Berlin Art Link, 2020). Rohrwacher aims to demonstrate the usefulness of such an approach and argues that when technologically enhanced sensory augmentation opens channels into previously unknown layers of the world we share, renegotiations of temporality and space become essential.

Rubina will join us to discuss how bees and their representations have recently become especially popular in the art sphere. This is linked to the growing awareness regarding the importance of their existence and the potential extinction of bees due to the urbanization, industrial agriculture, pesticide, climate change, and increasing pollution. Rubina will talk about the questions of agency of the Other (honey bees) and the responsibility of care via the symbiotic creative partnership in selected artworks of Aganetha Dyck, Tomàs Libertiny, and Garnett Puett Dyck, and some selected poems. Rubina will situate them in the Derridean discourse of difference and Donna Haraway’s exercise of kin-making and cohabitation.

About the speakers:

Juliane Rohrwacher is a PhD student at the Theatre Studies Institute of Leipzig University, Germany, where she completed two Bachelor’s Degrees, in English Studies and Theatre
Studies, as well as an MA in Theatre Studies with a focus on Immersive Arts. During that time, she worked as a student research assistant for Prof. Dr. Elmar Schenkel (British Literature).
Her thesis considers the social history of the representation of nature in arts and culture, as well as the role of contemporary, post-anthropocentric art projects in the recalibration of human-
nature relations in the Anthropocene. Rohrwacher is a regular contributor to the Society for Comparative Mythology’s (Arbeitskreis für Vergleichende Mythologie) “Mytho-Blog” and founder and curator of KunstUmWelten [transl.: art (world) environments], a blog dedicated to highlighting innovative impulses in the post-anthropocentric artistic landscape. Alongside her academic work, she teaches performative arts to children in a pedagogically supervised ecological garden in Berlin, Neukölln.

Rubina is a Senior Research Fellow at the Arts Faculty, University of Delhi. She received a Master’s degree in English Literature from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2021. Her research is focused on postcolonial ecocriticism and nonhuman narratives.

The Animal Studies Research Network at UCD is organised by Deborah Schrijvers and Poulomi Choudhury.

Thanks to @Europeana via Unsplash